Expensing your laundry

My wife loves free stuff.  I tease her, but she's very good at finding it.  She spots ads and coupons in the paper, on the internet, in our junk mail, and in other places I'm scared to discover.  We are forever getting free samples of toothpaste, makeup, laundry detergent, and countless other things in small packages in the mail.  I don't know how she does it, but it amazes me.  It is she who reads the fine print in all things contractual and I thank God that she has that skill every day of my life.

It was she who discovered on page 13 of my company's formidable expense report and travel policy document, that if I stay somewhere for a period of 5 days or more, I can expense my laundry.  Honestly, my first reaction was "Big Whoop."  I'm gone for 5 day trips all the time, but "How was I was supposed to expense my laundry on the day I was leaving," I thought?  I assumed that it was another "false hope" in the policy document (it's full of them).

Then I got to thinking… I've already taken the first step to laundry bliss by traveling with the same set of clothes for all of my trips.  Honestly, I have a traveling set of underwear, socks, shirts, pants, shoes, and workout clothes that take up the same spot in my suitcase week after week, whether I'm traveling or not.

Then it hit me.  I can rotate the laundry in the middle of the week!  So on my next trip, I left the house with enough clean clothes for my five day trip.  After three days of work, I called down to the front desk on Wednesday afternoon and told them, "I have some laundry to be done."  They sent a person up, took the laundry, cleaned and folded it, and had it back in my room a few hours later.  Awesome.  I wore my other clothes for the rest of the week.  Then the following week, I had dirty clothes in my suitcase from Thursday and Friday of the previous week… See where I'm going with this?  I checked in on Sunday evening and told the front desk clerk, "by the way, I have some laundry…"

So if you look at my expense reports, you'll see an expense for three days of laundry and an expense for two days laundry… every five days.  Brilliant!